If you're looking to build a new rig, I recommend going to www.tomshardware.com and spending some time reading. It covers everything about PCs to a very high level of detail.

You can learn all about CPUs, GPUs, RAM, mobo, power supplies, bottlenecks etc etc i.e. everything you need to make an informed decision.

As Feuer Frei! said, you'll pretty much always do better with a custom build than a prebuilt as the latter tend to make compromises in areas that can hurt performance, and they often aren't really optimised (e.g. they often build in readily anticipated bottlenecks, where one of the CPU, GPU or memory components significantly differ in capacity from the others).

Cheers

wow my other rig is an identical match
Ugly brother just about sums it up
Those Pentium Ds werent the best

He probably meant SSD (solid state drive i.e. basically a hard disk made of RAM)

I think he means SSD
Solid state drive
Like a big flash card

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

:D SSD...

On the new Win7 machine I built last year, I have two RAID-0ed Intel SSDs as my OS drive (along with important programs (games)), and you can pry them from my cold dead fingers! :DL

The machine is very fast to boot up, nearly instantly drops to the desktop, and I can immediately click all of the programs in the taskbar and they all quickly open up.

SSD drives are probably the best general performance upgrade you can make for your PC... They make everything snappy! :rock:

The SSD technology is just awesome and price points are coming down. Although the high quality ones are still a bit expensive when compared to a WD Raptor. I have built two SSD systems for friends as HTPC and they boot to the desktop at frightening speed. The SSD is a huge leap for the PC as it brings it to an almost instant on device.

As for dual core chips, I started on that road in '05 with AMD and still run an old dog X2 4800 on the 939 socket. The chip is good but the old ASUS Mobo is slowly dying. Its best to rebuild on a 2-3 year cycle these days and recoup your money by selling the parts on Ebay for on average 1/2 price. Wait to long and you just about have to give it away but at least its still being used and not going into a land fill or worse.

I do run a new Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.83 Ghz on my HTPC and I find it to be very capable and runs anything I need including Blu-Ray very nicely. There is plenty of CPU power available now and with multiple cores its up to the developers to write code that takes advantage of the processing power.

i agree

Single or dual core?....I dont'know....Dinosaur?
 

I really don't know what I have except my task manager is displaying 2 cpu's. Is this a dual core? I have 3gb ddr ram installed. The only game I play is SH4 and it goes fine on a Nvidia 9800GTX+ / 512mb DDR3 ram.

I copied this from the HP site. It's a A747C model. Is this a dinosaur rig?

Hardware
Base processor
Intel Pentium4 520 (P) 2.8 GHz (HT)
•800 MHz Front side bus
•Socket 775
•Hyper Threading technology
Chipset
Intel 915G
Motherboard
•ASUS name: PTGD1-LA
•HP name: Grouper-GL8E

Tom's is also a good source if you are trying to compare your old system specs with the SHV requirements. There are all sorts of charts and you can compare the performance of say a Pentium 4 3.2GHZ to a newer DuoCore, etc. model and see how they stack up. Video cards are in there too.

Minimum system configuration

CPU: Intel® Core2Duo® E4400 or AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 4000+ or higher
Operating System: Windows® XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista® (with Service Pack 2)
RAM: 1 GB (XP) / 2 GB (Vista)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
Minimum Drive Space: 10 GB
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX® 9.0c-compliant video card (ATI® Radeon HD2600/GeForce® 8800 or better)
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c-compliant sound card
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (included on disc)
Recommended system configuration

CPU: Intel® Core2Duo® E6850 or AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 5600+ or higher
Operating System: Windows® XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista® (with Service Pack 2) or Windows® 7
RAM: 2 GB (XP / Vista / Win7)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
Recommended Drive Space: 15 GB
Video Card: 512 MB DirectX® 9.0c-compliant video card (ATI® Radeon HD3000 series / GeForce® 9 Series or better)
Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0c-compliant sound card
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (included on disc)

Internet connection required :damn:

Ah ok, thought there was another initialization I had to learn. Thanks

That (HT) means HyperThreaded. That's fake dual CPU. Note that Windows sees a core as a CPU, and it sees a thread as a CPU. So if you have two quad-core hyperthreaded Nehalems, the OS thinks you have 16 CPUs. But you don't.

Although Hyperthreading works OK for very short-lived threads being created and torn down frequently. Look at a Sun T5120, for example: 64 threads, one real CPU.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...ers/031579.htm

Runs like a slug when you have unthreaded CPU-churning apps.

I am drooling.

Don't go by clock speed. Go by CPU throughput, which pretty much is higher for all the multi-core CPUs than for a single-core CPU, not because of clock speed, but because of bandwidth between RAM and CPU and CPU throughput. If SHV is not built with multithreading able to spread load across multi-cores, it's a dead dog. If it is built with multithreading (very likely is), your CPU is the dead dog.

But even clunky old games like IL-2 work better on a multi-core CPU. The game is bound to one of the cores, and all the other OS processes can use the other core(s), and it flies. You don't have to do all that stupid stuff like shutting down all services to reduce CPU usage.